Nobody expects Debian Contributors!

Pre-BOF notes

The problem

People seem to identify official recognition with some kind of
label. In that sense, you only get official recognition from Debian
if you are DM or DD.

I'd like to offer some form of official recognition to non-DDs who
are not DM. That can be because they do work other than packaging,
or because their packaging work doesn't require DM rights (for
example, they may be members of teams that work similarly to the
Perl one, or people doing a lot of sponsored NMUs).

I wish this sort of official recognition can also mean that DM can
be just a technical mean to a technical end, and loses the
"official hat" meaning, so that people don't try to get DM too
early, and developers don't advocate people for DM just to give
them some kind of recognition.

The proposal

But here are some novel implementation details that might just make it work:

Give that label to "anyone who has recently done work for Debian.

What you get for having that label, is to have your name on a list!

Rationale and details

Now, for recognition, you don't need much more than to have your name on some
official list of Debian Contributors. We can list "Current Debian Contributors"
and move names to "Past Debian Contributors" if there has been no activity for
some time, so that we don't lose credits.

I'd like each name on the list to point to a page which lists the person's
contributions, too, so that each person's contribution is credited properly,
and we would also have a useful page for NM.

The beauty of the proposal is that the procedure for assigning the label is
fully automated, hooking into whatever infrastructure we have to track
contributions. That means it's fair, it's low-maintenance, and that to get on
the list you just need to Get Some Work Done. Do-ocracy, for labels, too.

We can see it the other way round: if a team's contributors don't automatically
show up on the list, that is a strong motivating factor for that team to come
up with a way to acknowledge their contributors.

This means that by defining our official recognition label in this way, we also
create a reason for teams to actually credit their own work properly. This is
twisted and evil, and I am proud of it.

Practical/technical issues

This can be something we do at DebConf.

For naming, we can ask each Debian contributor to get an Alioth account, and
use it as a handle to refer to the person. That gives us a uniform namespace.

To track work, we need a mapping between Alioth accounts and GPG keys and email
addresses. That is something good to have anyway.

TODO: check w/ Lo-lan-do how alioth can keep a list of gpg key id associated to
accounts, similarly to what it already does for ssh keys.

Notes taken during DebConf and the BOF

We can also choose not to require people to have an Alioth account and
implement our own way of managing which identifiers (login, fingerprint, email,
wikinames...) belong to a same person. It is good to give people a choice about
their visible identity in Debian.

Some data sources may define 'contributor' status; some data sources extend
contributor begin/end times (like mailing lists) as soon as one is a
contributor through other things. For example, the Press Team could maintain a
static file with a list of member email addresses, and then the press team
mailing list archives can be used to see when one has started and ended
contributing.

Some lists are populated by real contributors, for example for teams that have
a workflow based on subject tags in mailing list posts. Those can be used to
define membership and not only timeframe info: it's up to a team to decide.

One needs to be able to opt out, or control which kinds of contributions are
made visible.

Email address should not be published by default. One can choose to publish
their email address, and/or a description string (for example, to tell the two
"Luca Bruno"s apart, and optionally a short bio.

Is it legal? We can make it opt-in by not publishing data by default, and
instead mailing people saying «We noticed that you have started contributing to
Debian, and we would like to thank you for it. Please click here if you would
like to appear in the Debian Contributors page.»

Also, we should not force people to be thanked. People should have a way to
control which kind of contributions are made visible, or to remove themselves
from the list entirely.

We do not need to look for perfection: if a person isn't credited and can get
credited by contributing some more, that's fine. However, if one has done a lot
of work already, they should be credited.

Also, coarse granularity is ok. Time resolution could be "a month". It is ok if
credits appear/update a day or two after a contribution has been made. Is it ok
not to list details of every contribution: I'm just happy with saying "active
in the BTS from 2003 to 2013" and link to DDPO.

General rule of thumb: «I'm happy to thank you, but I shouldn't need to go out
of my way to do so».